Tuesday, December 27, 2016

The Source Photographic Review ranks the top photobooks, with Robert Frank's The Americans at number one, Evidence by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel at #2, followed by Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Other titles on the list include Sol Lewitt's Autobiography, Self Portrait by Lee Friedlander, Larry Clark's Tulsa, Common Sense by Martin Parr, Untitled Film Stills by Cindy Sherman and Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip.

Monday, December 26, 2016

Hell, by Jake and Dinos Chapman, was a diorama consisting of thousands of plastic miniature figures of Nazis, depicting scenes of torture and mass killing, laid out in nine glass cases in the shape of a swastika. The epic work took more than two years to construct. It was purchased by Charles Saatchi for £500,000 and said to be one of his favourites.

It was one of several works destroyed destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire on Monday May 24th, 2004, which destroyed millions of dollars worth of art by Gillian Ayres, Patrick Caulfield, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Barry Flanagan, Chris Ofili and others.

The fire coincided with another problem for the Chapmans: "We're having a bit of a disaster in the studio," Dinos told the Guardian at the time. "There's a flood. We've had fire and flood and now we are expecting pestilence."

He added: "If the insurers decide the fire is an act of God it's going to be quite funny - that God destroyed Hell. In fact if that happens I will start going to church."

A decade later Momart approached the pair about contributing to their series of artists' multiples as Christmas Greeting Cards (see previous posts), as they had with other artists they had worked with, including those who lost significant works in the fire.

"We didn't have to think very hard," Dinos said, "What else could we do but come up with the idea of a Zippo lighter with the word Momart on it?”

Their proposal was rejected by the art handling service company, and a variation (commemorating the remake of Hell, now titled Fucking Hell) was self-published and available from the artists' website. It has subsequently sold out.

"The snowman is an image to which Gary Hume often returns. His screen print Snowman of 1996 presents a bold orange and brown snowman 'aglow against a soft sunset pink'. The painting Snowman of 1996 was a brown and red snowman against a rich blue background. Fuzzy Snowman [the present work] is icier with two white circles on a cool blue ground. It is a do-it-yourself artwork with a fuzzy ground an detachable felt pieces. For Hume the snowman is a self-portrait. It is seen from behind, looking toward the horizon and wholly dependent on the season. ... With thanks to Honey Luard at White Cube ... [and] Mandy Chubb at Fuzzy-felt."

- publishers blurb

"Every year the fine art handling company Momart commissions a British artist to design their corporate Christmas greeting which they sends to customers and contacts in the art world. In this multiple, issued as their Christmas greeting in 2000, Gary Hume uses the snowman, a form that can be articulated simply as two circles. Hume is best known for his glossy paintings, generally based on easily identifiable objects such as doors, flowers or the faces of celebrities, forms which he often represents in simple silhouettes.

Making pictures out of felt pieces is usually seen as a creative pursuit for small children. In this piece Hume alludes to the commonly-held view that 'Christmas is for children', but offers adults a chance to share in this pleasure and playfulness by designing an "interactive" greeting to be customised by the recipients."

A cast plastic multiple, depicting a deflated white balloon with a carrot-nosed snowman's face, produced as part of the annual gift program by the British art packing and transport company.
Inscribed on the verso: R. Hughes. Momart 2008. Issued in a ziplock bag with a two-page description:

"Richard Hughes makes intricate illusions that trick the viewer while, at the same time, laying their artifice bare. His sculptures and installations resemble the aftermaths of good times gone sour. Bags of jettisoned old clothes, rising damp, burnt-out hedges and surreptitious bottles of urine-dog-end residues which hint at elaborate histories. Culturally specific, his works tap into shared memories and the bittersweet feelings reserved for things past their best while revealing themselves to be shams".

Thursday, December 22, 2016

A red bronze metal coin incised and dated by the artist, distributed as the 1990 Momart Christmas greeting card.

"Coins, tanks, ribbon and childhood are recurring motifs in Bill Woodrow's sculpture. In this red bronze coin issued by Momart, Woodrow concentrates all of these potent themes into one design. Generally, each of Woodrow's symbols can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

In the context of the artist's output in 1990, however, each of these images plays a specific role. At the time, coins figured in many of his works, serving as a commentary on consumerism and the culture of consumption. Tanks, meanwhile, were Woodrow's means of addressing the worsening political situation in Croatia, which figured prominently in the news at the time. The artist repeatedly uses ribbon to signify union, a connection between disparate parts. In the figure of Humpty Dumpty, Bill Woodrow presents an easily-recogniseable nursery rhyme character, one who represents fragility."

A replica of a Issey Miyake designer bag was 3D scanned and reproduced with a 3D printer. The pattern/ structure of the original bag is similar to the polygon mesh, which is often used for 3D modelling. I met Julia on a recent residency in Norway and she is the weirdest and coolest.

I want the Air Jordan XI. While arguably the most popular Air Jordan style of all-time, I still remember seeing it circa 1995 at Footlocker with my older brother and thinking it was unlike anything I had ever seen - ugly and weird, yet streamlined; a completely foreign object. I had no prior reference point with which to assess it. Something totally new.

Its the shoe that motivated the Jordan brand to move Air Jordan Retro releases to Saturday so that students wouldn't cut class to wait in line.

Ella Dawn McGeough is an artist living in Toronto. Working across disciplines, her research expands upon processes of historicisation, myth-making and speculative feminism. With artists Colin Miner and Liza Eurich she founded moire.ca in 2012, which produces online contemporary arts publications among other project-based activities. She is also the co-founder of Garden Avenue, a summer-time exhibition space; Ray~Ray, a project that produces limited edition jewelry and jewelry-like work by contemporary artists; and Friends of Ogden Park.

Momart is a British company specialising in the storage, transportation, and installation of artworks, whose clients include the Royal Academy of Arts, Victoria & Albert Museum, the Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Buckingham Palace. They are perhaps best known for a fire that broke out in their warehouse in 2004, which damaged or destroyed several works by well known YBA artists, including
Tracey Emin's 1995 piece Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995. Emin has refused to remake the work, which remains one of her most celebrated projects.

Similar to the Peter Norton Family Christmas Projects (see related posts, here), each year Momart mails out an artists' edition in place of a traditional greeting card. Participating artists include Helen Chadwick, Peter Blake, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Mark Wallinger, Sarah Lucas and numerous others. Complete sets of the Momart Christmas card are now part of the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate.

Damien Hirst (who also had damaged works in the 2004 fire) designed the card in 1997, which consisted of a boxed perspex brick, screen-printed with his signature dots, all of which were white. Dot painting as snowscape.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.